Surface coatings such as monocoat, clearcoat/colorcoat, and tricoat are favored for the protection and decoration of substrates such as vehicle bodies. The surface coatings can utilize one or more pigments or effect pigments to impart the desired color or appearance, such as solid, metallic, pearlescent effect, gloss, or distinctness of image, to the vehicle bodies. Metallic flakes, such as aluminum flakes and pearlescent flakes are commonly used to produce coatings having flake appearances such as texture, sparkle, glint and glitter as well as the enhancement of depth perception in the coatings imparted by the flakes.
Lidar is a technology that measures distance to a target by illuminating the target with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor. Lidar is one of the key enabling sensing technologies utilized in the development of autonomous vehicles. Lidar systems used for autonomous vehicle applications usually use lasers in the near-IR region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Typically, pulses of light are sent from the lidar unit, and the time delay measured for the reflected pulse to be sensed by the lidar unit is used to calculate the distance between the reflecting object and the lidar unit.
Thus, a need exists to determine the lidar-reflectivity of an object painted with a given paint or coating.